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If you cannot do someone any good: don't do them any harm....
As long as you did this to one of these, the least of my little ones............you did it unto Me.
What profiteth a man if he gains the entire World at the expense of his immortal soul?

Well, you have to learn it first and you can bet that they only offer good money to experienced people. Getting that experience is the hard part.

Basically tier 1 helpdesk and telesales are right at the bottom of the foodchain.

The problem with going into programming is it will be an uphill struggle when you didn't start out doing it and are working full-time on something quite different.

I would say analysis, design, infrastructure support/management and project management are better fields to look at, as they demand a local presence, whereas code can be cut anywhere at any time.

Just do a Google search on C# programmers and you will see that India, China and Russia are all offering offshore development facilities.

Apart from web development, programming is actually a lot rarer than it was in my day. Most stuff is satisfied by package solutions these days.

If you cannot do someone any good: don't do them any harm....
As long as you did this to one of these, the least of my little ones............you did it unto Me.
What profiteth a man if he gains the entire World at the expense of his immortal soul?

I agree with Nihil. If you are very fresh and have never done programming before then you might want to think on that. If you become a programmer and want to work on the security then I guess application security would be your only option. AFAIK when it comes to application security, the first thing that comes to my mind is secure code (which is a broad term) and cryptography (which always has a good learning curve).

If you like databases then you should look into becoming a DBA, they are paid well.

And if you sole interest is security then *nix sys admins is the job for you but not that of a good pay.

C, C++ sorry but you need to know the basics. But then again I know RPG and COBOL

I don't know if I'd completely agree with that. C doesn't actually require the need to understand pointers, structures, and system calls (etc), and if you start out doing command-line software, studying C isn't actually difficult, does help you learn the basics, and can help familiarize you with the CLI in the meantime.

Then once you get a grasp of what's going on doing simple things in C, you don't have to learn a new language to start doing advanced programming with hardware and whatnot.

If you're going to start with assembly language, I would start with something like MIPS instead of x86, as it is a reduced instruction set architecture and is easier to get the basics. Also, using the MARS simulator tends to be easier to get started with than using an x86 assembler and having to learn to deal with all the syscalls at the same time.